One place for your cloud servers and your PCs

Think about what checking on one cloud server can involve:

• Signing in to the provider's console, finding the right account, region or subscription, and copying the server's IP address.
• Opening a terminal or a Remote Desktop window and typing that address, plus the user name you hope you remembered.
• Finding out the server was stopped, so back to the console to start it, then waiting for a new IP address.
• Doing it all again for the next server, at the next provider.

Meanwhile your PCs are in another app altogether. None of these steps is hard. It's the switching that eats the time, and the text file of addresses that's always slightly out of date.

In the Windows app's Connections page, you add your cloud account once. The app reads your servers from it and shows them in an import list: tick the ones you want, and they become ordinary hosts. Linux servers open in an SSH tab, Windows servers in a Remote Desktop tab, next to your PCs on the Devices page and your other servers. The help article on cloud servers from AWS, DigitalOcean and Azure lists the fields each provider asks for.

• AWS: EC2 and Lightsail instances, in the regions you choose.
• DigitalOcean: every Droplet in the account.
• Azure: virtual machines in your subscriptions.

Each imported host has a small badge (AWS, Lightsail, DO or Azure) with its state when it isn't running. Its menu can start, stop and reboot it, and on Azure deallocate it. When a server comes back with a new IP address, the host follows. And if your connections live in other terminal apps' session files, a spreadsheet or your SSH config, those import into the same list, with a preview first.

Start the staging server

It was stopped overnight to save money. Right-click it, choose Start, and watch the badge go from stopped to running without leaving the app. Its new public IP lands on the host, so the SSH tab opens on the first try.

Help a colleague

A coworker's PC is acting up. It's on the Devices page in the same app: open a session, or run one quick command without a session and let them allow it.

Shut down for the day

The test VM at Azure doesn't need to run overnight. Deallocate it from its menu, and it stops being billed for compute. Stop and Reboot always ask first, because anyone connected is disconnected.

Giving any app a key to your cloud account deserves some thought, so here's exactly what happens to it.

• Your PC talks to the provider directly. Listing servers and starting or stopping them are calls from your PC to AWS, DigitalOcean or Microsoft. Nothing goes through RemoteAccessApp's servers.
• The secret stays encrypted on your PC. The AWS secret key, the DigitalOcean token or the Azure client secret is stored encrypted for your Windows account. It's never shown again after you save it, and never written to logs.
• Your other PCs only get it through your vault. With Pro and your password vault on, the account is kept in the vault, end-to-end encrypted, so we can't read it. Turn off Save to my vault for an account and it stays on that one PC. Delete the account and it's gone from your other PCs too.
• Least privilege is the default advice. Importing needs only read access: a read-only IAM policy (the app has it ready to copy), a token with just droplet:read, or the Reader role. Add start and stop permissions only if you want them. When a permission is missing, the error names it.

Cloud accounts, importing and start, stop and reboot are on the free plan. Imported servers are saved hosts, so they count toward the free plan's 5 saved hosts and web panels. Pro removes that limit and syncs your cloud accounts between your PCs through the end-to-end encrypted vault.

The step-by-step guides cover each provider: AWS EC2 and Lightsail, DigitalOcean Droplets and Azure virtual machines. When you're ready, download RemoteAccessApp.